Back with their first new music since August of 2023, Portland, Oregon’s mighty Girl Drink Drunks absolutely rip it up on the five-song EP Meal Deal. This band, comprised of PDX punk mainstays Joel Jett, Adam Kattau, Capt. Johnny Sensitive, Rodrigo Diaz, and Matt “Wet” Waters, continues to play blistering, totally pissed-off punk rock that meets at the intersection of budget trash and early hardcore. But somehow, even after the consistently fantastic output this band has produced in recent years, Girl Drink Drunks have managed to totally blow me away with this latest release, which takes things to the proverbial next level. These tunes have grabbed me by the neck and kicked my ass into the next county. This, my friends, is punk fucking rock in all its fierce and furious glory!
I love hearing a band sing about how much it sucks to live in these dark times, and few vocalists are better equipped to scream out all those frustrations on an 11-out-of-ten intensity scale than Mr. Joel Jett. And if you like scorching guitars and forcefully bashed drums, you are in for a treat! If “Better Than a Human” had been the whole record, this would have already been an essential purchase. But there’s zero letup from there. The title track is an anthem for these times — an urgent reminder that a lot of people out there are struggling just to put food on the table. “Hang Time” might very well be the best song Girl Drink Drunks have ever put on tape. “Woke Up Screaming” is another raging ode to the bleak zeitgeist of Planet Earth circa now. And tying it all together is a smashing rendition of Screaming Sneakers’ classic “Violent Days.” That choice of a cover was not random. Girl Drink Drunks have made a record that speaks to the present condition. If you subscribe to the “Shit is fucked, but at least that means the punk rock will be really awesome” doctrine, well here’s the kind of record you’ve been waiting for! Dave Berkham recorded this EP at Village Squire Studios, and it sounds exactly like an impassioned punk record ought to. Crank these tunes at the loudest possible volume, sing along at the top of your lungs, and fire yourself up for the fight. Let’s be better than a human!
Back with their first new music since August of 2023, Portland, Oregon’s mighty Girl Drink Drunks absolutely rip it up on the five-song EP Meal Deal. This band, comprised of PDX punk mainstays Joel Jett, Adam Kattau, Capt. Johnny Sensitive, Rodrigo Diaz, and Matt “Wet” Waters, continues to play blistering, totally pissed-off punk rock that meets at the intersection of budget trash and early hardcore. But somehow, even after the consistently fantastic output this band has produced in recent years, Girl Drink Drunks have managed to totally blow me away with this latest release, which takes things to the proverbial next level. These tunes have grabbed me by the neck and kicked my ass into the next county. This, my friends, is punk fucking rock in all its fierce and furious glory!
I love hearing a band sing about how much it sucks to live in these dark times, and few vocalists are better equipped to scream out all those frustrations on an 11-out-of-ten intensity scale than Mr. Joel Jett. And if you like scorching guitars and forcefully bashed drums, you are in for a treat! If “Better Than a Human” had been the whole record, this would have already been an essential purchase. But there’s zero letup from there. The title track is an anthem for these times — an urgent reminder that a lot of people out there are struggling just to put food on the table. “Hang Time” might very well be the best song Girl Drink Drunks have ever put on tape. “Woke Up Screaming” is another raging ode to the bleak zeitgeist of Planet Earth circa now. And tying it all together is a smashing rendition of Screaming Sneakers’ classic “Violent Days.” That choice of a cover was not random. Girl Drink Drunks have made a record that speaks to the present condition. If you subscribe to the “Shit is fucked, but at least that means the punk rock will be really awesome” doctrine, well here’s the kind of record you’ve been waiting for! Dave Berkham recorded this EP at Village Squire Studios, and it sounds exactly like an impassioned punk record ought to. Crank these tunes at the loudest possible volume, sing along at the top of your lungs, and fire yourself up for the fight. Let’s be better than a human!
To tell you about Egregore’s second album, I’d like to first talk about wildness. If you traipse back to heavy metal’s origins, it was about wildness, right? “Helter Skelter,” Blue Cheer’s take on “Summertime Blues,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Child in Time,” and obviously our beloved Ozzy quaking in his marrow-deep terror: “Oh no… no! Please, God, help me!” Each of those opening shots across the bow feels like it was born of an unslakable thirst to approach some wild frontier and then to go beyond. But… beginnings are like that, right? It’s always easier to tap into something electric and potentially unstable at a time prior to the ossification of genre borders, stylistic signifiers, and listener expectations.
Even today, though, if you asked a random sample of people, you’d probably get a fair consensus that, yeah, heavy metal is wild at its core. But… is it? Is it always? What even does it mean, musically, to be wild? Because I don’t think it’s as easily quantifiable as something that’s fast, or aggressive, or raw. It’s probably not even quite right to say that everyone coming into the space of heavy metal since its feral beginnings is chasing that same wild fire. You might argue that we all should be, but the motivations for making art are as diverse and sometimes inexplicable as the effect of art. And to be truthful, friend? I don’t honestly have wildness in my heart. I’m lucky enough to be able to prioritize (and enjoy) things like comfort, routine, structure, safety.
Do you ever think about wildness? It seems to me there are a lot of people out there these days – many of them Men On The Internet who seem to be hawking, I don’t know, moose testicle protein powder and unearned expertise – who want to sell you an idea of wildness as some kind of exclusively masculine birthright apparently in need of reclamation. But there’s also a much longer tradition – far older and more interesting than these brittle, sad children – that links wildness with nature and the feminine. Of course, there’s a strand of that tradition that looks at nature, wildness, and femininity as things inherently in conflict with civilization, order, and masculinity, and just as with any binary system humans have yet dreamed up, it became a tool of oppression. But many pagan traditions looked at the idea of wildness in the light of fertility, fecundity, and creation.
To get a sense of which side might have gained the advantage in how we perceive wildness, consider how thoroughly our synonyms for it are negative. I don’t mean positive and negative as in good or bad, but rather positive as “a thing which something is” and negative as “a thing which something is not.” That skew is easy to find in alternate descriptions of “wild,” because so many of them frame the word as the opposite (or negative) of some other trait: to be wild is to be untamed, uncivilized, undomesticated, unruly, unrestrained. To bring things back to Egregore (“Thank fuck,” scream the blessedly patient hecklers in the back row), the reason that It Echoes in the Wild has lit an absolute fire in me every time I listen to it is that it feels like an album possessed of an absolutely positive conception of wildness.
Vancouver’s Egregore boasts members who have spent lots of time together in other bands including Mitochondrion, Auroch, and Ruinous Power. After the “duo plus guests” approach of 2022’s debut The Word of His Law, on album number two, Egregore has expanded to a permanent three-piece, with Shawn Haché on drums, lead vocals, and acoustic guitars, Sebastian Montesi on lead guitars, vocals, acoustic guitars, and synth, and Phil Fiess on bass and vocals. They are also joined by a stacked roster of guests, including additional lead guitar from Dylan Atkinson (who has spent time in Amphisbaena, Antediluvian, Rites of Thy Degringolade, and Weapon).
Despite the fairly tight stylistic Venn diagram of a lot of those associated bands, Egregore’s style is not easily reducible to any single thing. Certainly the most prevalent elements are drawn from black metal, death metal, and thrash, but this leaves all sorts of recombinant sequences where things fly off into moods covering black/thrash, prog death, shred, death/thrash, atmospheric death metal, bestial black metal, techy melodic thrash, and plenty more. My busted old ears pick up on bits of Absu, Morbid Angel, Aura Noir, Deceased, Voivod, Atheist, Abhorration, Khthoniik Cerviiks, Show No Mercy-era Slayer, and plenty more, but surely yours will hear other things. The most important thing, therefore, is the wild energy with which these songs consistently leap and lash. Each song is always in motion, propelled forward by Haché’s loose-limbed drumming and guitars that seem exclusively interested in doing the best shit constantly.
You know how Dark Angel’s Time Does Not Heal famously came with a hype sticker promising “9 songs, 67 minutes, 246 riffs”? If you want an easier way into Egregore than the treatise linking St. Augustine’s foundational dualism in The City of God Against the Pagans that I had initially planned to dump in this paragraph, please believe that It Echoes in the Wild is a wonderful place to be when you want to get in on that Dark Angel vibe and hear an abundance of guitars doing things that are fucking sweet.
“Six Doors Guard the Original Knowledges” has a slinky, Eastern-tinged theme that recurs, but while the guitars lead the action, the bass bends and swerves with the poised threat of a drunken giant. “Craven Acts of Desperate Men” features some pitch-perfect King Diamond vocal extravagance, but even better is the wild switch-up they pull starting at the 4:03 mark, in the super active bass that doubles the guitar but then later launches off down its own unruly corridors. “From the Yawning Crevasse” brings some of those early Atheist vibes (especially in the vocals), and at times like this when Egregore leans a bit more tech/prog death, it can feel a little like if last year’s tremendous Species album (Changelings) got totally Nuclear War Now!-ified.
Each song here has insane chops, memorable moments, and rickety, often barely-holding-on energy, but one of the ways Egregore really taps into what feels like a positive, generative wildness is in its multiplicity of voices. Each of the three band members supplies vocals (plus additional vocals from Auroch’s Cuillen Sander), so although this is a very lyrically dense album (both in the content of the words but also the amount of musical time that includes vocals), the fact that the tones and cadences are switched up so frequently makes it feel like a stultifying lecture and more like a restless collective interested in attack, attack, attack. This holds true for the guitarwork as well, which moves through a dizzying array of moods, rhythms, and elaborate counterpoints – yet none of this complexity detracts from the songness of each piece. To me, this is a particularly thrilling part of Egregore’s wildness, because it posits wildnessin community, rather than the self-defeating, macho, lone wolf horseshit more broadly in currency these days.
“Servants of the Second Death” sneaks in a little bit of tricky disco shimmy in the drums, but when it switches into a more restrained pacing around the halfway mark, the rest of the song is absolutely littered with some of the album’s most soulful, expressive soloing and guitar leads. Elsewhere, “Nightmare Cartographer” leads straight into “Six Doors Guard the Original Knowledges” so seamlessly that it is truthfully awe-inspiring.
And even from the start, Egregore is not shy about telling you where they are planning to go, given how the album’s first proper song (“Voice on the West Wind”) whips up such an utter shitstorm immediately that it’s hard not to just let yourself be buffeted by the album’s beatific vehemence for its entire 48 minutes. That opening tune also carries the subtitle “Odyssey as the Great Work,” which highlights another fact that makes It Echoes in the Wild such a front-to-back triumph: the lyrics. The final chorus is a poetic reflection on the wanderings of Odysseus, but it also notably brings things back to a vision of wildness as the creative pursuit of uncertainty:
“There is no glass to harness the hours; There is no compass with which to measure; There is no chart to harness the stars; There is no map with which to reveal.
The path is within this task of will and sin. The voice on the wind; this great work begins.”
Friend, if that doesn’t give you at least a minor case of the “fuck yes”es, then you and I are rowing down different rivers. Following along to the album with its lyric sheet adds such a layer of, well, just plain fun, because the lads of Egregore are clearly literate as balls but also deeply in love with the idea of play (which is a rarity in this general area of heavy metal that more often tries to present itself as “no mosh, no core, no ice cream, no smiling”). Like, check this opening salvo on “From the Yawning Crevasse”:
“Scythian stripped at the teetering Tridecennial, Cast chthonically in a gesture nearly final. Reaping will fulfilled as basic rites are shunned, trajectory unseen t’ward a peristaltic plunge.”
No, of course I don’t know what they’re talking about either, but goddamn do I want to join that wordplay party. Not only is the band invested in these rich, gleefully verbose lyrics, but they are also expert at the skill of deploying their lyrics as yet another element of pure sound, both in rhyming wordplay as well as how often the vocal lines are used to provide extra punctuation or counterpoint to the song’s rhythms. “Nightmare Cartographer” offers maybe the best example with this delicious couplet: “Unknowing nous gnosis in non-knowledge expounds / Within preternatura, the only secret is found.”
On the dead page, of course, that reads like absurdity, but when the band hits you with those lines in a thrashy, ear-catching cadence that drips with bile and spittle, the words come alive and feel like a truth you can neither articulate nor deny. But even for those of you out there, dearest neighbors and cousins and strangers, who couldn’t give three-tenths of a thesaurus-hammered shit about what Egregore might be jawing about, the band brings it home for you in the truest way, the only way: bulletproof songs that manage the delicate feat of telegraphing their perfect architecture while also sounding, at nearly every moment, as if the glittering shards of ore in each primordial vein they’ve tapped are being shaped extemporaneously as you listen, like a road whose every square foot and speck of asphalt solidifies just as you grind it beneath your hellion wheels; like a liquid-metal kiln fired by the unquenchable pyres of creation.
I think I’ve probably listened to It Echoes in the Wild a dozen times and I still don’t quite feel like I have my hands around it. In many other circumstances this might be a rhetorical move I pull to avoid outright criticism of an album with interesting pieces but which doesn’t seem to have the compositional acumen or raw heart to really stick to the ribs. In Egregore’s music, though, the live-wire blood and sinew of its wildness creates a disorienting effect where each perfectly mappable song also contains a spark that cannot be fully quantified. Take, for example, the final two-minute stretch of the title track which closes out the album: it jumps into a gleaming, incantatory mode that is as triumphant as daybreak, cycling through a beautiful clean-sung choral melody that opens with a line that adapts the inscription at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno in a way that might hold the key to the entire album.
“Abandon hope and fear / All you who enter here.”
Earlier in the same song, Egregore has already answered the unspoken question posed by the album’s title when they give us the message:
“The ancients speak, their voices all around. Listen close: it echoes in the wild.”
Manchester, England, became the starting point for Herman’s Hermits in 1963 when several local musicians formed a group that would soon become one of the most successful acts of the British Invasion. The lineup that carried the band to international fame included lead singer Peter Noone, guitarist Keith Hopwood, bassist Karl Green, guitarist Derek Leckenby, and drummer Barry Whitwam. Noone had already gained attention as a young actor on the long running television program Coronation Street, and his youthful voice and cheerful personality quickly became central to the band’s identity. With the guidance of manager Harvey Lisberg and producer Mickie
Tarja unleashes her brand-new metal album ‘Frisson Noir‘ on June 12th, 2026 via earMUSIC, the heaviest record of her career and a powerful statement of identity, strength and belonging. After years of exploring different musical landscapes, Tarja stands firmly where she belongs: in metal. ‘Frisson Noir‘ reflects Tarja’s ongoing dialogue between cinematic orchestration, classical heritage, […]
When people talk about the Big Four of the genre that Metallica invented (yes, they did), the conversation invariably moves on to who would be the fifth band on the list of Thrash Metal titans. Testament? Overkill? Violence? Dark Angel? Nuclear Assault? Death Angel? All great bands, of course, but this scribe’s choice will always be Bay Area bangers Exodus.
I genuinely believe that if their debut LP, Bonded By Blood, was released in 1984 when it was ready, instead of 1985 due to business and creative setbacks, we would be talking about Exodus in way more revered terms than we do.
I have been fortunate to witness the band a few times over the last ten years or so (with the now departed vocalist Steve ‘Zetro’ Souza), and I have been blown away by the band’s power in a live setting. The band’s previous two LPs, Blood In, Blood Out (2014) and Persona Non Grata (2021), were on heavy rotation in Kendrick towers, absolute Thrash Metal bangers.
Exodus release their 12th Studio Album, Goliath, on 20 March 20 2026, via Napalm Records.
I have been eager to devour the latest LP, appropriately titled Goliath, since it was announced that ex-vocalist Rob Dukes was back in the fray.
In Goliath, we have ten tracks of ferociousness that prove that Exodus are as relevant now as they have ever been. Dukes is like a man possessed. His guttural screams and barking vocal style fit the monstrous riffs and blistering drumming perfectly. The guitar duo of part-time Slayer shredder and Exodus founder Gary Holt with Lee Altus is something to behold. The riffs just keep coming.
From the intensity of the opening track 3111, the album keeps climbing like Alex Honnold [Google him, kids]. Hostis Humani Generis does not give you a chance to draw breath, and while we are on the subject of elite athletes, can we all take a moment and salute drummer Tom Hunting, please? For a man who has been fighting cancer, his performance is astonishing. A true legend of Thrash Metal drumming. Stay well, Tom.
The Changing Me is a mid-tempo headbanging beast of a track with a catchy (yes, I know!) chorus. Promise You This is a guaranteed mosh pit opener with its swirling riff.
The album’s title track is the closest Exodus has ever come to Doom Metal. I am getting Cathedral/Candlemass vibes. Fantastic stuff. We even get a string section courtesy of Katie Jacoby, and it works perfectly.
Beyond The Event Horizon gets us firmly back in the Thrash lane, holy crap, this stuff is awesome. I also love THAT bass sound that you only tend to hear in the Thrash genre. Jack Gibson is as solid as a solid thing. Superb.
2 Minutes Hate stabs and crunches along, another great track. Violence Works has an almost funk feel to it. Yes, I know, it does, honestly! It is also super-heavy at the same time. Do not panic, thrashers.
Summon Of The God Unknown takes us back to familiar ground with a super crunchy riff, complemented by Duke’s spitting out of the lyrics. Final track The Dirtiest Of The Dozen (great title!) has some Maiden-esque twin lead work before we get stamped on by the relentless riffing. It really is powerful stuff.
Exodus – Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville, CT – 3 February 2023. Photo: Shannon Wilk/MetalTalk
As you probably gathered, I love this record. The only gripe I have is that the production is missing the Andy Sneap touch. Sneap’s masterful production has been a mainstay since the 2007 album, The Atrocity Exhibition…Exhibit A.
Do not get me wrong. Mark Lewis has done a sterling job with Goliath. It is just missing that Sneap magic dust.
Exodus are currently on the road with Megadeth and Anthrax in the States. They hit UK shores with Kreator and Carcass towards the end of March.
Goliath will be released on 20 March 2026 via Napalm Records. It is available on all formats. Pre-orders are available from lnk.to/Exodus-Goliath/napalmrecords.
March
O2 Academy, Brixton211 Stockwell Rd, London SW9 9SL
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear
Event Details
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear Blast Records.
Krushers Of The World finds Kreator working once again with producer Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, delivering a huge, modern sound that still honours the band’s raw roots. From the blistering opener Seven Serpents and the horror tinted Tranenpalast to stomping mid tempo crushers like the title track and the anthemic Satanic Anarchy, the record shows a band that remains as hungry and dangerous as ever.
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear
Event Details
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear Blast Records.
Krushers Of The World finds Kreator working once again with producer Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, delivering a huge, modern sound that still honours the band’s raw roots. From the blistering opener Seven Serpents and the horror tinted Tranenpalast to stomping mid tempo crushers like the title track and the anthemic Satanic Anarchy, the record shows a band that remains as hungry and dangerous as ever.
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear
Event Details
German Heavy Metal titans Kreator have unleashed Satanic Anarchy, a brand new single and video from their sixteenth studio album Krushers Of The World, due 16 January 2026 via Nuclear Blast Records.
Krushers Of The World finds Kreator working once again with producer Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, delivering a huge, modern sound that still honours the band’s raw roots. From the blistering opener Seven Serpents and the horror tinted Tranenpalast to stomping mid tempo crushers like the title track and the anthemic Satanic Anarchy, the record shows a band that remains as hungry and dangerous as ever.
Gaerea is one of the bands that has attracted quite a lot of attention in recent years. A young band from Portugal that has managed to draw fresh, youthful and modern sounds from Black Metal, whilst also bringing a fitting stage presence to the table. They’ve done this across four albums, evolving steadily without becoming overly flashy. That’s about to change. Loss is different, sounds different and aims to be different.
One of the clear highlights of the album for me is “Submerged” – what a brilliant track. A wonderful combination of brutal heaviness, calmer, more emotional passages and brilliant lyrics. And if, whilst listening, you find yourself drawn into the depths of the song just as it describes, then they’ve got a lot right here. The penultimate track of the album, “Nomad“, comes close, even though the calmer passages are much more prominent; you can always recognise the black metal running through the song. The same goes for “Cyclone”, although for me it doesn’t quite measure up to ‘Submerged’ and tends to get a bit lost in the mix.
On the other hand, there are tracks like “Uncontrolled”, which leans heavily into Metalcore: charging forward in the genre’s typical, more monotonous style. The following track, “Phoenix“, operates on the same level; I prefer the riffs to those on “Uncontrolled“, but it does end up veering too far into typical Metalcore territory for my liking. And I found the final track, “Stardust”, absolutely wild. They really went all out with the experimental elements here: heavy riffs alternate with electronic piano sounds, aiming to leave the listener with a sense of emotion as the album draws to a close.
So what can be said about Loss overall? It is undoubtedly modern; much of what is currently considered contemporary in the heavier metal genres sounds like this. There are significantly more subdued sections in the songs, which are interspersed with heavier passages. To put it bluntly, with Loss, the band is moving much closer to the mainstream than we’ve been used to so far. This was already the case with their previous album, Coma, but it’s even more pronounced here. They sound more like what appeals to the young mainstream crowd, and as of 2026, that just happens to be Metalcore. So the ‘Blegh’ sound, as in “Phoenix“, is a must. And that won’t be to everyone’s taste; they’ll almost certainly disappoint fans from their early days, but they’ll also win over plenty of new ones. Even though you can still recognise their black metal roots in every song.
In terms of quality, it’s all absolutely top-notch, of course, and I’m sure one or two of the tracks will stay in my daily playlist for a while. But it leaves me torn, just as it will surely divide listeners and fans when it’s released.
The Brits High Parasite are pleased to present you a brand new single, “Drag Me Under”. It was recorded by David Watts, mixed by Lawrence MacKrory and mastered by Tim Turan. Read more…
